Is It Ever O.K. to Bootleg a Film (300,000 Times)?

While Hollywood continues to crack down on bootleggers, most recently by developing spy-camera technology, one fascinating account has surfaced of a bootlegger with a noble cause. Enter World War II veteran Hyman Strachman, who has spent the past eight years copying DVDs of the latest box-office movies and sending them oversees to American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to a touching New York Times profile, Strachman, now 92, began his 60-hour-a-week hobby after his wife died, in 2003, and he stumbled upon a Web site that aggregated soldiers’ care-package requests. After seeing how frequently soldiers asked for DVDs, the widower began his illegal venture, which, he estimates, has yielded more than 300,000 copies of films such as Transformers, Moneyball, The Artist, and The King’s Speech. Over time, Strachman has slowly streamlined his process. According to the Times:

Mr. Strachman has never ripped a movie from a store-bought DVD and does not even know how; rather, he bought bootlegged discs for $5 in Penn Station before finding a dealer closer to home, at his local barbershop. Those discs were either recordings made illegally in theaters or studio cuts that had been leaked.

Originally, Mr. Strachman would use his desktop computer to copy the movies one tedious disc at a time. (“It was moyda,” he groaned.) So he got his hands on a $400 professional duplicator that made seven copies at once, grew his fingernails long to better separate the blank discs, and began copying hundreds a day.

While Strachman understands that this activity, which has cost him an estimated $30,000, is not legal—"It's not the right thing to do, but I did it"—his son maintains that it "brought back his joie de vivre" by making him feel like he was part of a community. To date, the Brooklyn resident, who works from his apartment, has accrued countless thank-you letters and photos from appreciative soldiers, which he places in keepsake binders. Although it probably does not fully qualify as a “thank-you,” a spokesperson for the Motion Picture Association of America—a strong bootleg opponent—also had kind if vague words for Strachman's operation when asked about it by the Times: "We are grateful that the entertainment we produce can bring some enjoyment to them while they are away from home."